What do you know?

For some time I have been saying that all teaching and all knowledge begins with the senses. Now I don’t know why I ever said that because I realize I don’t and never really did believe it.

I think I simply didn’t realize what I was saying.

This notion is probably rationally absurd and certainly not Biblical.

For one thing, the Bible makes it clear that we know God’s law from the day we are born. That is why when I teach Aesop’s Fables (and I never tell the moral), I never hear anybody make an immoral application. Children get the morals more rapidly than adults do, and that point in itself bears great reflection.

There are things we know “by necessity.” But there are other things we know even before necessity presents itself. We know them by nature, in the sense that they are woven into our nature. We know, for example, that different things are similar and that similar things are different. We know that events occur in sequence.

We also know things that cannot be defended by words or even necessarily put into words, things that may not even be comprehensible, and yet things that precede all knowledge. We know that we are souls, for example. We just might not know what souls are. We also know there is a God, though we cannot know what God is.

This being so, it is dangerous to try to build a philosophical argument to defend the existence of these things, not because we seek to be irrational, but because two errors follow from the attempt:

1. We misdefine the thing we are talking about
2. We reduce the thing we are talking about to what we can understand.

As a result, a third error follows, namely that if someone doesn’t want to believe in what we are talking about, they can 1. point to our inadequate idea and disregard that and 2. attack our argument and think that doing so shows that the thing we are talking about does not exist.

If I were debating a “new atheist” or a french man, when they snickered at me, smirking, “ah, so you believe in god, do you?” I would answer, “Probably not. What do you mean?” If they could attach meaning to the word, I would know that whatever meaning they have attached would not refer to the true God, so I would say, “No, I don’t believe in that God either.”

Probably.